Zombie Crawl 2009 April 13, 2009

I found Jesus! He didn't eat my brain, but he did steal Nicole's heart, I think...

So, yesterday was Easter. Now, since I’m not Pagan, I don’t celebrate this holiday. Apparently, Christians do something with this holiday too, although since the day is named after an old Pagan goddess, this doesn’t seem to make much sense.

And since I love me a zombie or two (or several dozen), I couldn’t resist getting all zombied up and joining the festivities of the Philadelphia Zombie Crawl around South Street. Here I am if I were a zombie.

BRAINS!

We got our itineraries, grabbed some beers, and eventually groaned and lurched our way through the streets, occasionally finding a window to slap against menacingly which startled a few and amused most. No brain-eating commenced (as far as I know), but much beer was drank.

So, as the night progressed, we met up with lots of friendly zombies and had a great time. I remember, while in the bathroom recycling my beer, overhearing a conversation just outside the door. Two guys were having a conversation that went something like this:

Guy#1: “I wish I weren’t Christian, because then I could have been here all day getting drunk instead of going to church.”

Guy#2: “I’m not Christan, but I didn’t think about that. Yeah, and if we had been here all day by now we would be like zombies!”

Guy#1: “I just wish they didn’t do it on Easter Sunday, you know?”

Now, in listening to this I could not help but think that this guy missed the point. It’s done on Easter because, in some ways, the Jesus resurrection story, especially with the dead rising from their graves as part of the story, might be the world’s first zombie story. That’s why the image used to advertise the event looked like this:

Come get your zombies!

Granted, the story about Jesus’ resurrection is not exactly like a zombie story, but there are similarities. And for those of us that hold little to no reverence for the story of Jesus, this is just a fun day to act like zombies for a while and hang out with Jesus while having some beers. After all, if Jesus ever did exist, he probably would have liked such an event, I’d bet.

In any case, we had a great time. I will look forward to the Zombie Crawl next year. So, I want to thank everyone who showed up yesterday and made it a great time. Here is a picture of some of the people we crawled with, as we waited for our greasy and delicious food.

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Comments

Interesting that something I got kicked out of CCD for as a kid, showing up at a Church Halloween party as a Jesus/Zombie, has become an annual event in Philly for drunken adults 20+ years later.

Incidentally the idea that Jesus is the first “zombie” story or the first story to have superficial similarities with it is demonstrably false. There are so many folk and formal mythological stories from Ancient Egypt that follow the corporeal undead rising and or preying on the living, I’m shocked you’re not aware of this.

Even among the Judeo-Christian tradition (questionably assuming for the moment it wasn’t influenced at all by Egypt) no one could seriously claim that the Christ myth is the first to bear superficial resemblance to zombie stories. From Isaiah 26:19

the word translated as bodies, nebelah, literally means corpse in all other extant contexts. How about Ezekial 37:12

“I will open your graves, and cause you to come up out of your graves, and bring you into the land of Israel”

Then of course there are references to the wretched bodily undead in Daniel and the weird story of the witch of Endor’s resurrection of Samuel but I’m sure a person with a degree in religious anthropology missed these because his body had not metabolized all the alcohol he imbibed whilst he was “rationally responding” to the Easter holiday.

What was the attendance like for an event like this one? Was your group of zombies the only group or did you see others? Just curious.
-Staks
P.S. Tomkinson needs to drink a few beers and relax a little. He takes things way too seriously.

There were so many people that there were four different itineraries. This way, the four participating bars would not all be overfull, but would all be full. Each hour we moved onto the next place, meaning that every hour the streets were full of zombies.

Thus, four groups of zombies, perhaps 20-30 in each group, taking over south street.